Administrators and developers who need to detect whether Visual Studio 2015 is installed can use similar registry keys as with past releases. This time around, though, we’ve made some changes to the lineup of products but the registry scheme remains the same.
Most of the detection keys are found in the 32-bit registry hive – the ones you’ll typically want to detect, anyway.
- Core: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DevDiv\
\Servicing\ \ - Language pack: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DevDiv\
\Servicing\ \ \
Following is a table of the products we’ve announced.
| Family | Edition |
|---|---|
| VS | Community |
| Professional | |
| Enterprise |
The biggest change to the detection keys is that Enterprise replaces Premium and Ultimate. Community is also a subset of Professional which is a subset of Enterprise, so if you you have some dependency on a feature in Community, for example (like the ability to add extensions), you can detect all three “VS” family products by checking for Community like so:
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\14.0\Community
The registry values we store in either key are as follows.
| Name | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Install | REG_DWORD | Value of 1 means this edition is installed. |
| InstallerType | REG_SZ | Typically “MSI”. |
| SP | REG_DWORD | Previously the SP level. No longer used with the VSUpdate model. |
| SPIndex | REG_DWORD | Previously the SP pre-release iteration. No longer used with the VSUpdate model. |
| SPName | REG_SZ | Always “RTM” with the VSUpdate model. |
| UpdateVersion | REG_SZ | The RTM or installed VSUpdate version. |
| Version | REG_SZ | The RTM version. |
These changes go into effect with Visual Studio 2015 RC. I’ll update this page should we make any further changes for RTM.